The powerful currents of the Congo River, which gush into the ocean on the western coast of Africa, have gouged a gigantic canyon in the Atlantic seabed.
Scientists tell us that this underwater chasm is at least 100 miles long and nearly a mile deep–a gorge on the vast scale of the Grand Canyon. Ships plying Africa’s coastline chug over this desolate sink of cold, sunless space without knowing that it exists.
This is my favorite anecdote about Congo. It says everything you really need to know about the most Godforsaken country on earth.
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The assassination almost three weeks ago of Congo President Laurent Kabila may open a new chapter of history in central Africa.
Congo, whose very name evokes jungle drumming, Joseph Conrad, bad Tarzan movies and the earnest glamour of the Cold War, may actually get its act together and become a real country again. With a stubborn strongman such as Kabila out of the picture, the thinking goes, Congo can at last negotiate an end to its ruinous civil war.
The alternative is a cruel anti-future: de-facto partition by warlords, and a collapse into the sort of bloody scramble for loot and power that mutilated Congo during the colonial era, more than a century ago.
Either way, for those of us who have covered it of late, the Congo story has become a sad and extraordinary journey into Africa’s bruised core–an updated Conradian descent into the heart of weirdness.
Few places on the planet are as surreal as wartime Congo.
Imagine a chunk of territory as big as the continental United States east of the Mississippi, a vast land that is fracturing into medieval city states, or worse, total anarchy.
It is a shadow world of rebel fiefdoms and once-modern cities lit by winking palm oil lamps. A place where a Belgian-trained chef who once served the likes of French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and U.S. counterpart Jimmy Carter now presides over an empty restaurant that is itself being swallowed by jungle. Where Ukrainian mercenaries fly planes for all sides in the war, quietly agreeing not to shoot each other down. Where traveling 5 miles can take a day. Where time stops. For the past six months, I’ve spent more time in Congo than I’ve cared to. It is not a forgiving place to work. Kabila’s government has kept dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s spy cameras working in the rooms of Kinshasa’s main hotel. (You ask the clerk for a “no-camera” room, or you just put your dirty socks over the lenses.) And on the rebel side the jungle nights pass in suffocating dreams. In sweaty, airless rooms, the excess heat from a lone candle is unbearable.
Those of us who stumble through Africa’s biggest, messiest war try to leave quickly. Yet few ever forget the place. Congo doesn’t fade.
Less than two weeks ago, angry mobs attacked scores of foreign reporters covering Kabila’s funeral in Kinshasa. Gangs of ragged young men roughed up photographers, smashed taxi windshields, and smacked me on the head with a tree branch.
Yet later, from the safety of a press bus, I gawked out at this: groups of women in colorful gowns swaying like Motown backup singers, utterly oblivious to the mayhem around them. I had no idea who they were. But they smiled and waved at us even as others hollered for our blood. They made the whole scene seem unreal, like a strange joke.
It’s hard to love a place that wants to kill you. But I smiled too, crouching for cover while rocks whacked against the bus windows.
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The question on everyone’s lips in Congo right now is who, ultimately, will rule the vast, fragmented country.
Joseph Kabila, the dead president’s son, has been anointed the new leader by Kinshasa’s ruling clique, which is desperate to avert a bloody power struggle between the military and the politicians.
Only 31–or 29, or 32, nobody seems to know–the younger Kabila is a cypher to Congo’s 52 million people. He has made one bland 25-minute speech on television since assuming power. He offered no dramatic gestures to signal a breakthrough in the war against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda. And yet, diplomats desperate for peace in the region are hopeful.
But can anyone ever truly control Congo?
During colonial rule before 1960, the Belgians did little to build a traditional democracy in central Africa. It was enough for them to hand out ID cards to a handful of “evolved” Congolese who passed an exam for European table manners. And during the 32 years of dictatorship that followed under Mobutu, a whole new generation of leadership was smothered.
Today, Congo operates like a vast cargo cult–a remnant of that strange religion that blossomed briefly in the Pacific Islands after World War II. Once the GI’s left those remote atolls, rustic locals began constructing mock airstrips and bamboo office buildings to lure back the cornucopia of industrial goods or “cargo” showered on them by the U.S. government.
Fifty years later and half a world away, what passes for leadership in Africa’s third-largest nation, a treasure house of diamonds, timber, uranium and gold, is just as fantastical.
Real politics is stillborn in Congo. Whoever takes charge–Joseph Kabila or rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba; it doesn’t really matter–at best will disburse Congo’s wealth as Mobutu once did.
Congo began cracking apart long before the current war, at least since Mobutu lost his Cold War sugar daddies in the early 1990s. That’s what makes traveling through the place today so bizarre; it is an ersatz country populated by talented actors. Everyone is just going through the motions.
A Congo “roadblock” is a grimy string drawn across a forest path, supervised by a gum-booted soldier with a notebook and a pen with no ink. He laboriously grinds out a “security pass,” using his spit on a scrap of paper, which can be thrown immediately into the nearest creek. He is merely playing his part. He is busking for a cigarette.
“There are more than 400 opposition parties in Congo and not one can organize a decent rally,” said an exasperated diplomat in Kinshasa, who bemoaned Congo’s stunted political culture. “Most of these parties are ridiculous. They consist of three people who call themselves kings.”
Three months ago, Tribune photographer Jose More and I confronted Congo’s leadership vacuum in a rebel town called Bumba, on the banks of the Congo River. We were detained by the local commander who was too frightened to release us without direct orders. Yet he also was, maddeningly, too terrified to contact his superior. So we stewed in our boots for three days.
Bumba was a typical Congolese town. It was a logging center that had slumped back into the pre-industrial age. Its 60,000 long-suffering residents hadn’t seen a functioning car in two years. A “truck” was two men pushing firewood in oversized wheelbarrows. A Chinese-made flashlight passed for high technology.
The rebels installed us at the Hotel Mozulua, advertised as “The Most Chic in Bumba.” There was no plumbing. The walls and furniture were greased black by the trails of energetic rats. Prostitutes lounged on the verandas. Yet a carefully typed and elegantly worded list of house regulations still adorned every single room.
Sixteen rules in a $1.50 a night hotel.
This is pure Congo.
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Near Gbadolite, a savanna town of 10,000 where rebels roar around in North Korean Jeeps captured from Kabila’s troops, I took an afternoon off to visit Mobutu’s abandoned palaces.
Only then did I fully grasp the awful depths of Congo’s woes.
By some estimates, Mobutu poured $3 billion of the public’s money into his palace complexes around Gbadolite. One mansion is constructed from tons of imported Italian marble. Atop a nearby hill he built an exact replica of a Chinese pagoda, complete with Asian landscapes hand-painted by Chinese artisans and a 1-acre rose garden. The price of each of the pagoda’s thousands of fine, hand-glazed roof tiles could have educated a Congolese child. Villagers who live nearby in mud huts said it took thousands of looters three whole days to strip the facilities bare in 1997.
The aging dictator, fleeing Kabila’s onrushing troops, flew out on a 6-mile-long airstrip built especially for chartered Concordes.
Mobutu’s obscene excesses have a precedent in Congo history. Adam Hochschild, in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” notes that little really distinguished Mobutu from Belgium’s rapacious King Leopold II except the color of their skins. The European monarch’s ruthless exploitation of Congo’s ivory and rubber led to the deaths of millions of Congolese–the modern era’s first genocide. In another first, Leopold launched a successful media campaign to whitewash his atrocities.
“Many a time . . . I have seen a man immediately after being flogged, laughing and playing with his companions as if naught had happened,” went one paid article in a 1907 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Leopold torched Congo’s archives in 1908 to erase any evidence of his methods. Those methods included the type of mass amputations now associated with Sierra Leone.
Americans are a famously forward-looking people. Understandably, perhaps, most look on Congo’s troubles with utter incomprehension and even a bit of eye-rolling impatience. But we are lucky in our history. There are still a few of us, living in places with names like Wounded Knee, who know the past isn’t so easily buried.
Congo, with its mythic river and unseen depths, is one of these places. I am haunted by it. And I fear I will be returning there soon.
